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Partner solution · Innocens

Early warning systems in hospitals, built on industrial container technology.

In partnership with Innocens and the University Hospital of Antwerp, Portainer supports neonatal intensive care and medical research by simplifying the management of software installations inside the hospital network.

The challenge

Detecting sepsis early, in software that has to be managed like a medical device.

Early warning systems for failure detection are widespread in industrial applications, and healthcare is only now adopting them. Innocens, a spin-off of the University Hospital and University of Antwerp, develops an AI-based clinical decision support system for neonatal intensive care that detects the early, non-specific signs of sepsis in preterm infants. Software of that kind must not only work; it must comply with security and data protection requirements, be easy to manage, and be updated regularly across every deployment.

That is where the operational problem sits. The application runs on premises to keep sensitive clinical data inside the hospital network, which means each hospital is an independent deployment, and each one still needs to receive validated updates without a technician attending in person.

Improve neonatal intensive care

Increase patient safety and deliver solutions for families, with clinicians alerted sooner and given an objective second opinion on the state of the patient.

Minimize the technology concerns

Reduce the operational overhead so the team can concentrate on research and development of new algorithms and treatment methods.

Deploy safely inside hospital networks

Enable easy and secure deployment of software and medical devices within hospital networks, where the data protection requirements are strict and non-negotiable.

The solution

GitOps against the repositories the team already uses.

Portainer manages the software installations across participating hospitals, with GitOps driving updates from the repositories Innocens already maintains rather than requiring a separate release process. Jolan Depeter, lead software developer at Innocens, has described the value plainly: because the GitOps capability listens to their existing repositories, the team can update many deployments at once.

The wider point generalizes beyond healthcare. A clinical application, an industrial gateway and a substation analytics workload all share the same operational shape, being independent on-premises deployments that must stay current, stay compliant, and stay auditable without a person visiting each site.

Innocens and its technology have been in a validation phase, working with partner hospitals to validate clinical effectiveness. Statements on this page describe the joint deployment approach rather than a claim about clinical outcomes.
The joint solution, written up

Read the independent write-up.

IoT Use Case published the Innocens and Portainer solution example.

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